Now that finals are over, I’ve been able to spend more time hacking on Eclipse. One of the things I’ve been working on recently is extending the shared editing work that Mustafa showed in his screencast about a year ago to encompass an entire project. Two of the most common issues that users have with the current functionality is its inability to share multiple documents and that it is not “workspace aware” on the receiver’s end. I collected both of these concerns along with the request to distribute resource changes and proceeded to try to hack something out.

My screencast should hopefully demonstrate what I’ve managed thus far. It’s about seven megabytes so it might take a while to load. There’s no audio but I think that the text narration on the screen should be sufficient.

I’m not sure what the next step is (well, beyond what I’ve outlined here), so if you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on the bug. Without a doubt, the concept of distributing resource changes is intrusive and controversial so I’m probably going to have to do more investeigating as to how turning that off will interfere with the shared editor. In any case, I hope that this will be useful to others in the future, particularly those that are interested in trying out pair programming. I’ve only pair programmed a few times (during some late evenings with Igor to meet deadlines :)) but I found it really, really helpful.

Please note that this will not make Galileo.